Histocrypt - Transcript

Today I'm at Bletchley Park, where I've been part of the Histocrypt conference. And HMGCC has been exhibiting, for the first time ever in public, Alan Turing's speech encryption machine, Delilah. I think the story of Alan Turing's association with Bletchley Park is pretty well known now, particularly after a major Hollywood movie and a number of books.

Now, what's much less well known is that Alan spent a number of years working at Hanslope Park during the war, where he developed the Delilah speech encryption system. One of the great things we were able to do was to bring, I think, probably for the first time ever, a collection of really quite extraordinary machines that have been used, not just for things like sending secure messages. You know, people know what an Enigma machine is. But we had also been able to bring along some other quite unusual devices. And in particular, there's one that's one of my favourites. Delilah that was invented by Alan Turing for making secure phone calls. So essentially, if you imagine a phone call as a piece of text and then you could encipher it, how would you do that with a voice message?

And he'd invented this piece of kit and the specifics of it were put into the National Archives a few years ago. What's been happening quietly behind the scenes over the past few years, is a team led by John Harper, who's a well-respected participant in the National Museum of Computing, where I'm standing and supported by HMGCC. These guys have been working together to bring Alan Turing's machine back to life, and we were able to see this thing in operation to actually hear what it sounds like to hear an encrypted phone call. I mean, it’s one of the most extraordinary things; this piece of 1945 technology brought back to life for us! For the first time. And what an amazing thing!

That's only half of it, because we've also done something else, which I think is really, really important as well as fun, which is to bring a group of people together to talk about the digital skills gap and how we can learn lessons from these, the studies of the past, and apply them to excite a new generation of people about things like today's problems with communication, security, cyber security, you name it. We don't have enough kids coming through and actually taking those subjects.

HMGCC National Security Engineering